I've been playing around with textures in Adobe Illustrator. Encouraged by the thoughts on the topic of Von Glitschka, and the pictures of several other illustrators, including Jeffrey Pelo, I decided to give it a try. Since I do a lot of watercolor painting, I am partial to the look of natural textures. So this is a great way to "naturalize" the slick perfection of color blends and builds in Illustrator and Photoshop.
The drawing itself started from one of my sketchbook drawings. I scanned it in and traced it Illustrator. I then colored it with flat colors using various levels of transparency. At this point all the colors were very flat, so I wanted to crunch it up a bit. So I ran outside with my digital camera and shot the road surface in front of my house. I brought it into the computer and loaded it up. I think it worked well!
